Tasting
Whether you want to be a coffee connoisseurs, or just want to enjoy a great tasting cup of coffee it is important to understand how you taste things. Today scientists have found that the textbook tongue maps are misleading. Although they generally indicate where we perceive sweet, sour, salt, and bitter, the maps are not conclusive. In fact, we can perceive flavors all over our tongue and each persons tongue is different. Some of the more successful cupping programs have trained people to use their knowledge of the regions outlined by tongue maps to help them identify unknown flavors based upon the position of the stimulus.
That’s why it is important to understand how your tongue and how your tongue interacts with certain flavors. This is obviously not necessary to enjoy a cup of coffee but it is helpful in understanding what it is about the coffee that you enjoy.
Understanding your tongue is pretty simple. Gather some sugar, citric acid, salt, and quinine (available in tonic water). Dilute each sample and paint your tongue in small sections with these solutions using a small tipped paintbrush. Start with the regions other than those indicated on the textbook tongue maps. For instance, determine where on your tongue you can perceive the sugar solution other than the tip of your tongue. The tip of the tongue will be the most sensitive region, but you might be able to taste aspects of sugar in other places. Next, experiment with different concentrations and compare your results with other people. It is important to know your ability to taste in relation to other people, kind of like people who say they don’t have a strong sense of smell. Otherwise, our vocabulary to describe coffee will be skewed based upon our genetic predisposition to being supertasters, nontasters, or medium tasters. If you know you are a supertaster and you experience a extremely bitter taste in a coffee, you should realize that 75% of people probably wont agree with you.
After creating a map of your tongue try mixing different flavors together and see how they interact. Do they simply target both regions of the tongue where the stimulus alone would occur or do you get entirely new flavors in different regions? Continue experimenting with different combinations until you have combined all the different regions together.
Another way to test your ability is to have someone else make up blind samples for you to taste. Once you can identify each of the components you have officially mapped your tongue and trained yourself to be able to approach much more complex systems such as coffee. By using the maps you create for your tongue, understanding your perception ability, and understanding how flavors interact you are more apt to describe coffee accurately. This will also help you in tasting wines, chocolate and beers.
